Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks: Price, Features & What’s Best

We compared Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks on price, features included, and customer reviews. QuickBooks Enterprise is ideal for businesses on a budget that have complicated inventory needs and require parent and subsidiary tracking and reporting. Sage Intacct is best for larger companies that need multiple approval levels and tracking by entity, department, and location.

When to Use QuickBooks Enterprise

QuickBooks Enterprise is ideal for businesses looking for robust accounting software that can handle complex inventory tracking, add multiple users with permissions, and create consolidated reporting for multiple entities. At a starting price of $1,100 per year, you get unlimited technical support, annual product upgrades, and software that grows with your business.

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When to Use Sage Intacct

Sage Intacct is ideal for larger businesses needing to track income and expenses for multiple entities, departments and locations. You can create custom dashboards for departments (e.g., accounts payable) or roles (e.g., CFO). At a starting price of $5,000 per year, you get unlimited technical support and product upgrades.

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When to Use an Alternative Option

QuickBooks Online is ideal for small businesses that don’t need multiple entity tracking, consolidated reporting or multiple levels of approval. With starting prices of $20 per month for service-based businesses and $60 per month for businesses that need to track inventory, QuickBooks Online is a great alternative to QuickBooks Enterprise and Sage Intacct.

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Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks Enterprise at a Glance

How We Evaluated QuickBooks Enterprise & Sage Intacct

QuickBooks Enterprise and Sage Intacct are accounting software products that are ideal for small- to medium-sized businesses that need to track income and expenses for multiple entities, locations, or departments. These companies often need the ability to create additional users with restricted access, have intricate inventory requirements, and want to produce consolidated financial reports.

Below are nine key areas we used to evaluate Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks Enterprise:

• Cost: The software fits the budget of a small business.
• Ease of use: The program is easy to setup and use. No accounting or bookkeeping background is required to learn how to use the program.
• Accounts receivable management: Businesses are able to keep track of unpaid customer invoices so they know who owes them and how much is owed.
• Accounts payable management: Businesses can keep track and manage unpaid vendor supplier bills to ensure they are paid on time.
• Inventory tracking: If you sell products, you can track inventory costs, quantities, and multiple units of measure within the software.
• Accept online payments from customers: The software enables you to get paid faster by allowing you to accept online payments with a debit card, credit card, or ACH bank transfer.
• Integrates with financial institutions: To minimize manual data entry, you have the ability to connect bank and credit card accounts to the software so transactions automatically download into the program.
• Multiple entity tracking: The program allows you to track income and expenses for more than one entity, such as a parent and its subsidiaries.
• Consolidated financial reports: You can easily generate consolidated reports that include multiple entities with different currencies.

Our evaluation was based on getting hands on experience with Sage IntAcct vs QuickBooks Enterprise and weighing each product on the criteria outlined above. When it comes to features, both products are pretty close in what they have to offer. However, QuickBooks Enterprise is our top pick because it offers a more affordable pricing plan for small businesses.

Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks Enterprise: Pricing & Features

At a starting price of $1,100 per year, QuickBooks Enterprise is more affordable than Sage Intacct, which starts at $5,000 per year. Despite the cost difference, these products have very similar features. However, QuickBooks Enterprise allows you to connect your bank and credit card accounts, while Sage Intacct does not. On the other hand, Sage Intacct allows you to access your data from any mobile device, and QuickBooks Enterprise does not.

QuickBooks Enterprise Pricing & Features

In addition to affordable pricing, QuickBooks Enterprise is easy to set up and learn. While the program is intuitive, your subscription includes access to a live support team 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The ability to add up to 30 users, keep track of up to 1 million products, and create up to 100,000 customers and vendors means you won’t outgrow QuickBooks Enterprise anytime soon.

Based on our minimum criteria, here is how QuickBooks Enterprise stacks up against Sage Intacct:

Pricing

QuickBooks Enterprise is structured as an annual subscription. The starting price is $1,100 per year versus $5,000 per year for Sage Intacct. This price includes one user license, but you can purchase up to 30 additional licenses. This price also includes unlimited live technical support 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Platform

QuickBooks Enterprise is not a cloud-based program like Sage Intacct. Instead, you must install the software on your computer in order to use it. If you need to access your data remotely, you have to sign up with a hosting company and pay additional fees.

Accounts Receivable

You can create custom invoices and track the money customers owe in QuickBooks. Similar to Sage Intacct, you can run an accounts receivable aging report in QuickBooks to see which invoices are coming due or are past due. You can also record any form of payment in QuickBooks. Intuit Payments allows you to accept online payments from customers, which we cover later on.

Accounts Payable

Stay on top of your vendor supplier bills by running an accounts payable aging report in QuickBooks Enterprise. In addition to tracking unpaid bills, you can track all paid bills and run detailed expense reports to see where your money is being spent. Sage Intacct also allows you to easily manage your accounts payable.

Purchasing

Both QuickBooks Enterprise and Sage Intacct allow you to create professional-looking purchase orders to send to your vendor suppliers. Once you receive your order, you can quickly convert the purchase order to a receiving document and record the items that were received. Once you get the bill from the vendor, you can convert the receiving document to a vendor bill and schedule it for payment.

Inventory Tracking

Like Sage Intacct, QuickBooks Enterprise is ideal for businesses that sell products. You can track the inventory process from purchase all the way through to product sales. QuickBooks Enterprise uses the average cost method for inventory valuation and allows you to create and track up to 1 million items in QuickBooks Enterprise. However, if you prefer the FIFO inventory method you can purchase the Advanced Inventory module for an additional fee.

Accept Online Payments

To get paid faster, we recommend you sign up for an account with Intuit Payments. This is the credit card processing service offered by Intuit. Once you sign up, your customer invoices will include a payment link. Customers can simply click on that link and follow the on-screen instructions to pay their invoices with a debit card, credit card, or ACH bank transfer. Additional fees will apply.

Listed below are the fees associated with accepting online payments in QuickBooks Enterprise:

Consolidated Financial Reports

Similar to Sage Intacct, QuickBooks Enterprise lets you consolidate reports for multiple entities, locations, and departments. This is ideal when you have a parent company with multiple subsidiaries or one company with various locations. While you can customize existing reports, QuickBooks Enterprise does not have a robust report writer that you can use to create reports from scratch like Sage Intacct includes.

Granular User Permissions

As with Sage IntAcct, you can create granular user permissions to give staff access to the areas of the software they need and no more. You can assign a role to a user and to modify it as needed. This gives you more control over what information users can access.

Multiple Levels of Approval

Unfortunately, QuickBooks Enterprise does not include multiple levels of approval. Once a user creates and saves a transaction, it’s automatically recorded. There is no approval process in QuickBooks Enterprise. While this may work for a small business that doesn’t have a lot of staff, it might not suit a much larger organization. Therefore, if you need multiple levels of approval, you should choose Sage Intacct.

Integrates with Financial Institutions

One of the best features included in QuickBooks Enterprise is the ability to connect your bank and credit card accounts so that transactions automatically download. This can save you a lot of time because you won’t have to export the data to Excel first and then import it as you have to do with Sage Intacct. If you have a lot of transactions, this feature is going to make reconciling your accounts a breeze.

Multiple Entity Tracking and Reporting

QuickBooks Enterprise allows you to create a company file for each entity you need to track. However, you cannot access all entities with a single sign-on like you can with Sage Intacct. Instead, you need to sign into each company file separately. The good news is that you can consolidate the reports for multiple entities, such as a parent and its subsidiaries.

Multiple Location Tracking and Reporting

If you have more than one location you can easily tag transactions with the appropriate location or split transactions into multiple locations. This type of tracking allows you to run reports by location to see how they are performing which can help you to make good business decisions. This feature is also available in Sage Intacct.

Industry-specific Features

A key feature that is not available for Sage Intacct is the industry specific features that QuickBooks Enterprise includes. QuickBooks Enterprise comes customized for nonprofits, retailers, professional service providers, manufacturing and wholesalers, and contractors. You get a custom chart of accounts listing and products and services listing as well as customized reports for your industry. This saves you a lot of time that you would have spent customizing QuickBooks for your niche.

Sage Intacct Pricing & Features

As discussed, Sage Intacct pricing starts at a steep $5,000 per year. However, it is one of the most robust QuickBooks alternatives on the market. The report writer tool allows you to create reports from scratch, the multiple levels of approval, and the custom dashboards are just a few of the features that make it stand out against its competitors. However, the inability to connect bank and credit card accounts is a key feature that’s missing.

Based on our minimum criteria, here is how Sage Intacct stacks up against QuickBooks Enterprise:

Pricing

When you look at the cost of QuickBooks Enterprise vs Sage Intacct, there is no comparison. Sage Intacct is almost five times the cost of QuickBooks Enterprise at $5,000 per year vs $1,100 per year for QuickBooks Enterprise. This is a pretty hefty price tag for a small business to pay.

Platform

Sage Intacct is a cloud-based program that does not require you to install software on your computer like QuickBooks Enterprise does. Unlike QuickBooks Enterprise, you can access your data in Sage Intacct from any mobile device with an internet connection.

Accounts Receivable

Similar to QuickBooks Enterprise, Sage Intacct includes end-to-end accounts receivable processing. You can generate invoices that include your company logo and brand, email invoices to customers, and accept a variety of payment methods. Plus, you can stay on top of unpaid invoices by generating an accounts receivable aging report in just a couple of minutes. This report shows which customers you need to send a payment reminder for incomes that are coming due or past due.

Accounts Payable

Like QuickBooks Enterprise, Sage Intacct keeps track of unpaid vendor supplier bills. You can set up payment terms for vendors so the system can remind you when a bill is coming due. The program also helps you stay on top of the cash flow required to meet your obligations. By reviewing the accounts payable aging report you can see what bills are coming due and when. This information will help you to plan your cash flow requirements.

Purchasing

Full-cycle purchasing is included in both QuickBooks Enterprise and Sage Intacct. Sage Intacct allows you to create a request for purchase by completing a purchase requisition form. Once approved, the purchase requisition can be converted to a purchase order so that the information automatically transfers from one to the other. When the product is received, you can convert the purchase order into a receiving document so the receiving department can confirm the items were received.

Inventory Tracking

If you sell products, Sage Intacct has the ability to track quantity, costs, and sales for items that you keep in inventory. You have the ability to keep track of key information for products, such as a unique product number, SKU, cost, sales price, and quantity. Each time you complete a product purchase or sale, all inventory quantities and costs are automatically updated in real time.

Consolidated Financial Reports

Sage Intacct allows you to generate consolidated reports for multiple entities, such as a parent company with subsidiaries, even for entities located abroad. As with QuickBooks Enterprise, consolidated reports can be generated for specific subsidiaries or all subsidiaries. You can run reports in the subsidiary’s home currency or convert reports to the currency of the parent company. If you can’t find a report with the data you need, the report writer allows you to build reports from scratch.

Custom Dashboards

One feature included in Sage Intacct that is not included in QuickBooks Enterprise is custom dashboards. You can create role-based dashboards such as a CFO-view that shows total revenue, total expenses, or other information. You can also create one for a department such as an accounts receivable dashboard with total outstanding accounts receivable balance and number of unpaid invoices. Dashboards allow users to access real-time data without having to request it from the accounting department.

Granular User Permissions

One of the big pluses of using Sage Intacct is the amount of control you have over the information users are able to access. User permissions can be limited to a specific entity, location, or department. For example, you can give someone the ability to create invoices for all company locations or just specific locations. In contrast, permissions in QuickBooks Enterprise can be limited by entity but not by location or department.

Multiple Levels of Approval

Sage Intacct lets users create multiple levels of approval, a feature that is not available in QuickBooks Enterprise. Approval levels add another layer of permissions and security. For example, you can give an A/R clerk the ability to create invoices, but the invoices go into draft status until someone else reviews and approves them. Once the invoices are approved, they go from draft to posted and that is when the financial statements are impacted.

Integrates with Financial Institutions

One downside to using Sage Intacct is you cannot automatically download your bank and credit card transactions into the program like you can with QuickBooks Enterprise. Instead, you need to export your bank and credit card transactions to an Excel csv file, and then you can import them into Sage Intacct.

Multiple Entity Tracking and Reporting

Similar to QuickBooks Enterprise, you can record transactions for multiple entities. Unlike QuickBooks Enterprise, Sage Intacct allows you to access all entities with a single login. Once you select the entity, you can generate invoices, pay bills, and run reports for each entity. You can also record inter-entity transactions in the same currency or multiple currencies.

Multiple Location Tracking and Reporting

If you’ve got several locations you can easily tag a transaction with the appropriate location. This enables you to run profit and loss and balance sheet reports by location. QuickBooks Enterprise also has this capability.

Collaboration Feed

The collaboration feed is a messaging tool within Sage Intacct that allows you to communicate with your team about any document or transaction recorded in the system. You simply type your message, select the recipient and they will receive a notification in their collaborate feed. This is a feature that is currently not available in QuickBooks Enterprise.

Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks Enterprise: Setup & Ease of Use

Sage Intacct and QuickBooks Enterprise are very similar when it comes to navigation. Both programs have menus located at the top and on the left side of the home page. Additionally, there are icons on the homepage that represent tasks, such as creating invoices or receiving inventory. When it comes to setup, Sage Intacct is a bit more complex and requires more time than QuickBooks Enterprise.

QuickBooks Enterprise Setup & Ease of Use

You have a number of options when it comes to navigating QuickBooks Enterprise. Similar to Sage Intacct, there is a top menu bar and a left menu bar. Plus, you can click on the icons directly on the homepage.

The QuickBooks Enterprise homepage has each module along with the corresponding tasks associated with each one directly below it, as indicated below:

A brief description of some of the information that appears on the homepage of QuickBooks Enterprise is below:

• Vendors: You can access the vendors center by clicking on the “vendors” button that appears on the homepage (shown above). You can also select vendors from the top or left menu bars (not shown). Directly below the vendors section are icons representing various tasks typically performed for vendors.
• Customers: Similar to vendors, you can access the customers center by clicking on the “customers” button on the homepage (indicated above). The customers center is also accessible from the top and left menu bars (not shown). Directly below the customers button are common tasks performed for customers, such as creating sales orders, estimates, and invoices.

Other areas of the software such as banking and company can also be accessed directly from the QuickBooks Enterprise homepage.

Sage Intacct Setup & Ease of Use

Similar to QuickBooks Enterprise, there are a variety of ways you can navigate within Sage Intacct. The first is to click on the module you would like to use by selecting it from the top menu bar (as indicated below) or from the left menu bar (not shown).

Below is a snapshot of the data and tasks associated with the purchasing module in Sage Intacct:

Below is a brief description of what you will see when navigating around Sage Intacct:

• Top menu bar: Select the module you want to work in from the top menu bar or a left menu bar that is not shown in the screenshot above.
• Data: Based on the module you have selected, you will see an icon that represents key information related to your selection. In our example, we have chosen the purchasing module. As a result, we see vendors, warehouses, product lines, items, and price lists. Icons are grayed out for users who do not have access to an area.
• Tasks: The tasks area shows various types of transactions related to the module you selected. Our example shows transactions related to the purchasing module. This module’s tasks involve creating purchase requisitions, creating purchase orders, receiving shipments, and others. If your permissions do not include a particular task, that icon is grayed out.

Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks Enterprise: Customer Service

Sage Intacct and QuickBooks Enterprise include a variety of options to get help when you need it. If you prefer to talk to someone, you can call the customer support line and speak with a representative. If you prefer to self serve, you can watch video tutorials and pre-recorded or live webinars to learn how to use the software. Plus, you can access help resources within each software program.

QuickBooks Enterprise Customer Service

There are a number of ways you can get help with QuickBooks Enterprise. You can speak with a live person by calling the customer support number. Assistance is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This service is included in your subscription and is unlimited. There is also an extensive video library and a help menu within the software that includes detailed information and links to other resources.

Sage Intacct Customer Service

Similar to QuickBooks Enterprise, Sage Intacct provides live customer support via telephone. This service is included with your paid subscription and it is unlimited. Sage Accounting also offers live or recorded webinars on both basic and advanced topics. Within the program, you can search the help menu to gain access to other available resources and information.

Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks Enterprise: Reviews

QuickBooks Enterprise and Sage Intacct have more positive than negative reviews. Customers like how robust both programs are and that they offer features for both small and large businesses. Negative reviews for Sage Intacct focus on the steep cost, and QuickBooks Enterprise users would like to see improvements made to the inventory features.

QuickBooks Enterprise Reviews

Similar to Sage Intacct, reviews for QuickBooks Enterprise are mostly positive. QuickBooks Enterprise users like how powerful the software is and feel like they won’t outgrow the program anytime soon. The few negative reviews mentioned that the inventory features could be improved upon.

Sage Intacct Reviews

Sage Intacct reviews are also mostly positive. Positive Sage Intacct reviews like the features included for both small- and large-sized businesses and the insight the custom dashboards provide. Negative Sage Intacct reviewers shared that the software is very pricey for small businesses.

Pros and Cons of Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks Enterprise

There are many pros and cons of Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks Enterprise. On the pros side, QuickBooks Enterprise is affordable, easy to setup and use, and it integrates with banks. Sage Intacct has a robust report writer, multiple levels of approval, and custom dashboards. On the cons side, you must pay hosting fees to access your QuickBooks Enterprise data remotely. Sage Intacct has a steeper learning curve than QuickBooks, and it does not integrate with banks.

The pros and cons of Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks Enterprise are:

Pros of Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks

Cons of Sage Intacct vs QuickBooks

Bottom Line

Now that you know the cost, features, and what customers are saying about Sage Intacct and QuickBooks Enterprise, it’s time for you to choose the best software for your business needs. If you need multiple levels of approval or robust reporting across entities, departments, and locations, choose Sage Intacct. However, if you need to manage complex inventory or you need to track and report on parent and subsidiary companies, choose QuickBooks Enterprise.

QuickBooks Enterprise meets all of our criteria, including an affordable starting cost of only $1,100 per year. You can take QuickBooks Enterprise for a free 30-day test drive or sign up for a paid subscription and start using it right away.

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